November 29, 2010

Yesterday, the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks began releasing their giant trove of confidential US diplomatic cables. This morning, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman summarizes some of these documents’ revelations, which include evidence of Arab leaders urging the US to attack Iran, the US using its embassies as part of a global spy network and the US asking diplomats to gather intelligence.

In a Democracy Now! round-table discussion with Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg; The Nation’s Greg Mitchell, who has been blogging about WikiLeaks on Media Fix, Carne Ross, a British diplomat who resigned before the Iraq war and As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Ellsberg says that "It is too early to judge the values and dangers" of the new WikiLeaks documents, but he reminds viewers that "not one single soldier or informant has been in danger from any of the WikiLeaks releases….That risk has been largely overblown."

Greg Mitchell agrees that it is too early to assess the WikiLeaks documents, but he compares the new batch of WikiLeaks documents with the previous releases from July and October of this year. Mitchell says that while the earlier documents garnered "one-day stories," media coverage about the new WikiLeaks information "will be emerging over the next nine days in the New York Times for example, and WikiLeaks has said on their own site that it will be going on for months."

Stay tuned for more breaking news coverage of the WikiLeaks releases from Greg Mitchell on Media Fix.